Last Will and Testament
by A plus
Summary: After being released from the hospital at the end of the war, Hermione is dragged down to the ministry to answer some questions about the late Severus Snape.
1. Chapter 1

Last Will and Testament

Hermione stood up gingerly and flexed her feet against the cold tile stone floor. She dressed, for the first time in several weeks, shedding her lightweight hospital gown for a set of black robes. She pulled the robes over her head, forcing her sore limbs to thread through the holds in the garment. She flinched slightly as the coarse fabric scraped against the newly-formed scars on her body.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before gathering her things and heading towards the door. She should stay a little longer, she knew that. But she had been in the St. Mungo's for several weeks now and what she wanted more than anything was to go home and sleep in her own bed. The beds at that hospital were terrible, she wasn't sure how the healers expected anyone to get better if they couldn't get a decent night's sleep.

She stepped out into the nurses' area and picked up the quill to sign her voluntary release forms. Her gaze rose from the parchment to meet a familiar set of green eyes.

"Harry," she gasped, pulling him in for a tight hug.

"Hermione," he whispered, pulling her close, holding to him as the nurses bustled around them, oblivious to anything except each other.

"Is it really over?" he whispered finally. "Did I really kill him?"

"Yes, Harry, you killed Voldemort."

He had done it himself, heard it verified by hundreds of people, yet he hadn't completely been able to accept it until she had confirmed it for him.

"Let's go, Hermione. Come to Grimmauld place with me. It has a ton of beds and all of them are softer than the ones here."

Hermione grinned.

They turned to leave when they heard a voice behind them.

"Hermione,"

She and Harry both turned to stand face-to-face with Kingsley Shaklebot.

He nodded politely to Harry and then continued to address Hermione.

"Hermione, if you'll just come with me to the ministry, we have a few questions for you."

She felt her heart sink. All she had wanted was to go home and sleep. What more could the ministry have to ask her? While they had been in the hospital, each survivor had given a long, detailed account of their experiences in the war.

"Kingsley," Harry implored him, but the man simply help up his hand to stop Harry from speaking.

"It will just take a few minutes, Mister Potter, and it cannot wait." Kingsley said kindly but firmly

Harry looked at his friend.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"That will not be necessary," Kingley said before Hermione had a chance to answer.

A few minutes later, they were sitting in a conference room at the ministry. She sat on one side of the table, across from Kingsley. Percy Weasley sat to his side, scribbling notes on a large notepad.

Kingsley sat across from her, looking her straight in the eye.

"What was the nature of your relationship with Severus Snape?"

She was speechless. That was not a question she had expected, not a question she could even really understand.

"Professor Snape?" she asked in confusion, "he was my teacher at Hogwarts."

"Besides that, in what other capacity did you know him?"

She hesitated, unsure of what the wizard meant.

"He was a member of the Order of the Phoenix…a spy."

Kingley studied her in silence for a few moments, as if trying to ascertain if she was hiding something. Finally he decided to get right to the point.

"Did you have a sexual relationship with Severus Snape?"

Her mouth dropped open. It took her a second to recover her ability to speak.

"What?"

"I think you heard me, Hermione, but I will repeat the question. Did you have a sexual relationship with Severus Snape?"

"No! How would you even…Why would you even….What would make you think that…."

She took a deep breath.

"He was my teacher. He was nearly twice my age. He hated me. I wasn't even at Hogwarts this year. Do I need to keep listing reasons why your question is so ridiculous?"

Kingley reached into the folder he held and pulled out a piece of parchment. From the insignia at the top she could tell it was a copy of her transcripts from Hogwarts.

"You did very well in his classes," he remarked suspiciously.

"I did very well in _all_ my classes," she snapped at him. "I worked hard for every point I got, _especially_ in his class. How dare you suggest my grades are a product of anything other than that."

"I know this must be hard to talk about, Hermione," he said in a warm but condescending tone, trying a different approach. "He was in a position of power and took advantage of you. It must have been hard to say no to a wizard of his power, of his authority."

She stood, indignantly.

"I don't know what this is, I don't know what you're getting at, but this isn't worth my time. If someone made some ridiculous accusation…If someone was trying to get some revenge, to stir up some rumors... I could see this being the type of thing that would interest Rita Skeeter, But certainly the Ministry has better things to do with its time than investigate outrageous claims of a dead professor having an affair with a former student."

Shaklebot pulled out another document from the folder he held, this time it was a photograph. He slid it across the table towards Hermione. She stared at it, a shiver running down her spine. It didn't move. She had never thought about it before, but a muggle photograph and a magical photograph looked exactly the same when they were of a dead body. And there it was, written in blood, his own blood, written on the splintered wooden floor of the shrieking shack. It had been scrawled in a hurry as he was counting down the seconds until his death, but the handwriting was unmistakable.

_To Hermione Granger, I leave everything._

She sat back down.

"Why would he do that?" she whispered.

"That's what we're trying to find out."

The utter look of horror and bewilderment on her face was enough to convince the auror that she was telling the truth. He let the vial of veritaserum slip quietly back into his pocket.

She stared silently at the photograph. The corpse lay still in the picture, the only movement discernable was the faint reflection of the flash of the camera in the blood, looping over and over again. She was hit by the horror of the situation. He had not been dead when she and Harry left him in the shrieking shack. Why had they assumed? Why had they not checked for a pulse?"

"I don't want it."

He studied her for a moment. "Miss Granger, this is a will written in blood, it carries magical power with it. You have no choice. He left you everything."

Percy walked to a small table by the wall and picked up a box from it, carrying it over and setting it down on the table in front of her. It contained a wand and a few other odds and ends.

"What is this?"

"These were his personal effects… found on him when he died. They're yours."

She fastened the lid on the box.

"His Gringotts key is in the box. His wards should be adapted to recognize you now. Hogwarts needs his chambers cleared out by the end of the summer. I take it you don't want this matter to become public?"

A mumbled reply was the best she could do.

She looked at the photograph again. This had not been planned, had not been premeditated, this had been a dying man's last desperate act.

She made it back to Grimmauld Place in a daze. It was a miracle she didn't splinch herself. She opened the door to find a mass of people, celebrating the return on their heroes. She made her way through the crowd, barley aware of the people around her. Finally a familiar voice broke out over the din.

"Hermione."

She looked to her side to see Harry emerge from the crowd.

"Mione, I was worried about you. You've been at the Ministry for a while."

She looked at him and he could tell that something was wrong.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her into the large pantry, shutting the door behind them.

"What happened? Where were you?"

"I was at the ministry being interrogated about my illicit affair with the late Severus Snape."

"Your _what_?"

She handed him the photograph.

He studied it for a few moments and then looked up at her cautiously.

"Hermione, did you.."

"Of course not. Merlin, Harry, give me some credit."

"Sorry," he muttered. "So what did you do?"

"I accepted it. I had to, it was written in blood."

"He was a Slytherin." Harry stated after a long silence.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that he was a Slytherin and as much I don't want to sound horribly cliché, he wouldn't have left you anything unless there was something in it for himself."

"He's dead, how could there be anything in it for him?"

"I don't know, but there is."

"Revenge? We left him, Harry. He was still alive when we left him. Maybe he wanted me to feel guilty."

"If he wanted revenge, he would have gotten it on me."

"True." No matter how much he had hated her, he had obviously hated Harry more.

"And Hermione, even if we had stayed, even if we had gotten him help…there is no cure for Nagini's bite. There was _nothing_ we could have done."

"I know," she whispered.

"He didn't like you, Hermione. That wasn't acting, that wasn't pretend, you genuinely irritated him."

"I know," she said again, this time a sad smile creeping onto her face.

"Which makes it just that much harder to understand."

Harry studied the photograph, his eyes taking in each and every detail.

"Hermione…If I died, I would leave you everything I had, because you're my best friend and I love you…but if I didn't….I would leave you my things if there was something that I wanted to be found."

She stared at him intently, not speaking but slowly digesting each word.

"We have to look at it from Snape's point of view. He didn't know much about you, only the part he saw in class. He knew you as the girl with her hand in the air, the girl of nothing but questions and answers. He saw your intelligence and your insatiable curiosity. Maybe he knew that he could spark that curiosity, that you would go through the things he left you until you found what he wanted to be found. Maybe he held some secret that he wanted brought to light."

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"What were you up to Professor?" Her voice echoed in the empty chamber. A chill ran down her spine. He was dead, she knew that, but she could still feel his presence here. Maybe it had been a mistake to come down to the dungeons alone, but she was there now.

She had gone through the box of his personal effects first, his wand, various potions he had carried with him, and a strange object she did not recognize. It was small and golden, a magical object of some sort. But it did not fit the description of anything she had come across in any of her readings. She tucked it into her pocket and carried it around with her constantly, taking it out and studying it whenever she got the chance.

She spent the next month sorting out and boxing up his possessions. Hogwarts was going to have a new professor in these quarters before the school year began. It was hard to imagine. She was thankful to have something to do, something to give her purpose besides studying for her NEWTS. She poured through his books, through his laboratory equipment, but found nothing that explained why he had left these things to her.

Then one day, she made a discovery. She was emptying out his desk when she came across a black leather notebook in the back of a drawer. It was heavily warded. It took her two days and five books from his personal library to open it. Finally, the covers fell open, revealing page after page of the angular handwriting she knew so well. It seemed to be a laboratory journal of sorts, detailing his experiments.

She turned the page and there it was, a sketch of the object she had been staring at for weeks. She took it out of her pocket and set it down on the page. It was nearly identical. She looked at the smooth lines on the paper. She had no idea that the man could draw. The sketch was so…him. Each line was carefully and precisely drafted with exact dimensions and angles marked, but then parts were shaded with deep charcoal shadows, complex and mysterious, making the object on the page seem almost three-dimensional. She skimmed through the pages of calculations that accompanied the drawing. There were variables, amounts, volumes, but the end of the equation always ended up in years.

She picked up a quill and a blank piece of parchment and went back over the calculations, this time following along. She worked her way through the same complex arithmantic formulas, pulling books off his shelves to assist her when she got in over her head. Day turned into night which turned back into day but she barely noticed as she worked her way through the formulas. Finally she threw the quill down and stared at the object which sat gleaming and still on the desk.

A modified time-turner, based on entirely different principals than the original. A time-turner that manipulated time not in hours but in years.

She could do all the calculations, all the research she wanted, but it always came down to the one unknowable factor: how many times had he spun it?

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A/N: Just a short little story, only one more chapter after this one. Just something that kept me writing when I got stuck on some of my longer stories.


	2. Goldilocks and the TimeTurner

Part II: Goldilocks and the Time Turner

Hermione Granger had given her time-turner back to the ministry after her third year. She had told them that it was too much, that she couldn't handle the schedule… but that hadn't been the whole truth.

She didn't trust herself with it.

She had felt it pull at her, luring her and seducing her. It was addictive. The feeling of loss of control scared her. It had taken all the self-control she had to give it back, but she had done it.

But then…then he had died and left her in possession of a time-turner. And not just any time turner, but one of his own design, one capable of moving both backwards and forwards, one capable of moving through minutes or through years.

She loved the adrenaline rush, the mystery of weaving together the past and the future.

Since his death, she had lived backwards and forwards through time. She hadn't been as daring as the professor had, but he had had nothing to lose. She only used hours, sometimes a day, sometimes a few days, but only if she really really needed it.

Ever since she had first felt the rush of time through her hair, she had known that she would never be happy with a linear life. She loved the feeling of time being pulled away from her. It was like standing in the shallow waves of the ocean as the tide was going out with her feet buried in the sand feeling the water rush around her and pull the sand with it as she stood still against the flow.

Hermione Granger stayed away from drugs, stayed away from the Dark Arts, but she couldn't resist the pull of time.

Time magic wasn't dark magic, but it was still powerful magic, dangerous in its own right.

Time was both her ally and her enemy. She both controlled it and was controlled _by_ it. She was both its master and its slave. She stared down at the small instrument in her hand. She knew he had spun it, but not how many times. There was nothing in the past for him...she knew he had thrust himself into the future, but not how far. And so she waited, knowing that he could appear from oblivion at any second. She prepared for it, kept herself busy with the things that needed to be done, but always with that sense of anticipation. She sifted through a never-ending sea of seconds searching for the _one_, the one she so desperately sought, the needle in the haystack. She could play around with time all she wanted, but in the end, there was nothing to do but wait.

x

x

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Darkness. All he could see was darkness. And pain. The pain was so strong he could see it at the edges of his vision, a searing white against the pitch black.

"I won't bury you again," he heard a woman whisper. Who was she? Why had she buried him?

It all came back to him, Voldemort, Nagini, writing his will in blood, spinning the time-turner. He had split himself in two, one that stayed in the present and died and one that was flung forward into the future.

So this must be the future.

He forced his eyes open.

It didn't look much different than the past.

His gaze was fixed upwards on the rotted wooden ceiling of the shrieking shack. Oh yes. Hadn't a part of him always known that he would die here?

Was he dead already?

He felt small hands on his chest. He could only assume who they belonged to. Did she know what she was doing? She was just a student…No….he reminded himself, time has passed. How much?

His eyes shut again as he quietly slipped out of consciousness.

Severus cracked his eyes open. How long had he been out? It had been light out when he had first opened his eyes and now the room was dark, lit only by a few burning candles. He could only assume that it had been several hours at the very least. It could have been days.

It had worked then. How far had he traveled? He didn't remember how many times he had spun it, only the desperate feeling as his fingers had twisted the tiny metal parts, only the weightless feeling of being pulled out of and away from time.

A glass of water was brought to his lips and he drank. The cold water felt amazing on his raw throat. The glass remained at his lips but he pushed it away. It wasn't that he didn't want any more of it, just that he had to know…

"Did…is he…what…" he croaked in a hoarse voice.

"Harry killed Voldemort. He's gone. Forever." She answered him in a soft voice. He let out a deep breath, a breath he had possibly been holding over half his lifetime. It was over, at last. Had been over, he corrected himself, had been over for some time now.

He looked for the first time at the woman who sat in the chair beside his bed. She was older, much older than the last time he had seen her, but certain characteristics still tied her in to the overenthusiastic eighteen-year-old he had known. Her wild brown hair and her bright eyes seemed to have resisted the pull of time.

"Sixteen years?" He guessed, studying her face.

"Twelve," she responded curtly.

It was never good to tell a woman she looked older than she really was. But she didn't look offended, she looked…guilty. He would have thought he had insulted her if not for the guilty look she gave him. It was not that she looked older that her years. If only twelve linear years had passed, she had been playing with time.

His eyes drifted down to the delicate golden chain on her neck that disappeared beneath the collar of her robes. He had no doubt as to what lay on the end of the chain, hidden from view.

He reached up and stroked her face with an uncharacteristic tenderness.

"Yesterday you were a little girl."

"Yesterday was over a decade ago, Professor."

It always felt like this to him, when he ran into ex-students out in public. Sometimes it had been years since they had last graced his classroom, but he was always surprised that they were not still children. It always felt as if they had grown up in the blink of an eye…this time she actually had.

"Tell me about it, about how it ended," he asked quietly, pulling himself up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, but making no move to stand.

"It was the night you…d..d-disappeared…" Died, she had meant to say. She recounted the events for him, reliving every tragic death, uttering the names she had not spoken in years: Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevy... When she finished, she took a deep, calm breath. She had had twelve years to make her peace with the past. He, on the other hand, was visibly disturbed. She had had fifteen years to deal with the pain and the loss, but for him it had been only days ago that it had all ended.

"Well, your plan worked," she said suddenly, breaking the silence in an effort to distract him from his morbid thoughts.

"I had only a slight hope that it would," he admitted, with an amused smirk on his face. "No one has traveled this far forward in time ever before."

"No, they haven't."

She pulled the chain out from under her shirt and fingered the time-turner on the end of it as he spoke.

"I would have expected that alone to kill me."

"It probably would have, but I spent two years at University on a research project about the effects of time travel on the body and was able to identify all the affected systems and to find procedures to alleviate the strain of long-distance time travel."

His mouth dropped open slightly, but then he reminded himself that this was why he had chosen the girl, after all.

"I would think that that would require a level of knowledge of healing..."

"I am a qualified Healer."

He studied her for a moment.

"Of course you are."

She didn't reply.

"But even for an experienced Healer, a bite of that extent from a dark creature such as Nagini would be almost incurable."

"I earned a degree in the Dark Arts with an emphasis in dark creatures and developed a potion that made healing a bite of that nature more easily cured."

"But to brew a potion that complex would require..."

"A mastership in Potions, yes." She looked down at her hands to avoid his penetrating stare.

"Exactly how many degrees do you have, Miss Granger?"

What followed was an inaudible mumble.

"How many, Miss Granger?"

"Well, I needed Arithmancy to do the time-travel research and then healing and dark arts and potions, and a few years in transfiguration and a degree in magical law because the laws they had dealing with wizards presumed dead really left something to be desired and..."

"How many?"

"Nine."

His mouth dropped open.

"Have you spent the past twelve years studying?"

"Not _all_ of it," she replied indignantly. "What did you expect me to do? Just wait until you showed up and watch you die?"

She stood by the window for a moment, turned away from him. He was getting a strange feeling, one that he couldn't quite put his finger on. He didn't know what, but something was off with the woman.

"I haven't thanked you yet," she said finally. Thank him for what? She was the one who had saved his life.

"For what?"

Her lips cracked into a mischievous smile.

"For paying for my education." How else could she have achieved all those degrees?

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

"Don't worry, I've started earning money on some of the spells that I've created. I'll pay you back, it just might take some time. I didn't use _all_ your money."

She bit her lip as if worried he was going to berate her for spending his money...spending his money to acquire the skills to save his life.

He stood, shakily.

"Miss Granger, I left the money to you. There is no need..."

"There is."

They stood at a deadlock, staring at one another for a moment. He got that feeling again, a strange look her in her that told him there was more going on than he knew about.

"Can you walk?" She asked. "We should probably get you somewhere more comfortable."

He looked around at the shack in which they stood.

"How do you have all this stuff here anyways?"

"I arranged for Hogwarts to let me use this place as a laboratory of sorts. But if you're feeling up to it..."

"Yes," he responded quickly. He hated the shrieking shack and had no desire to stay in it any longer than necessary.

"We can go then."

"Where?" He asked

"Home."

He gave her a questioning look.

"Your home," she corrected herself.

"You're living in my house?"

"It seemed like a waste to spend money renting somewhere to live when there was a perfectly good house just sitting empty."

He scowled at her. She smiled.

"As I said earlier, Professor, I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm only a few years younger than you now and it's going to take a hell of a lot more than that to intimidate me."

She already had a portkey set up to take them to Spinner's end since he had still not gotten all of his strength back.

They arrived on the front porch of the house. Her hand reached for the knob, but hesitated before turning it.

"I can be out in a few days, I just need some time...some time to find somewhere else to live." There was a sadness in her voice that he couldn't place. He knew Spinner's End was no dream house, why would anyone be reluctant to leave?

He nodded. She opened the door. They stepped inside.

She probably hadn't thought she had changed anything, but she had. It was clear that she had meant to disturb as little as possible, but there were a series of small changes that probably seemed insignificant over the years, but seen all at one were glaring. The house seemed brighter, happier.

He had no doubts that when she left, the brightness would follow her.

She looked around the room nervously. She had thought of this moment periodically over the past twelve years, thought of what she would say to him when he reappeared.

"All those years, berating me in class, implying that I was stupid…and in the end you gave me the biggest compliment you could. You put your life in my hands."

"There were others who could have, who had the ability. I chose you because you _would_."

She looked at him.

"You are brilliant, but there are other intelligent witches and wizards, some even that already possessed the specialized skills you had to acquire. How many of those would have taken the time, the personal risk to save my life? How many of those would have even thought that I deserved it?"

It was not the answer she had expected.

"Does anyone know?"

"Harry. Harry knows."

"Of course."

"He won't say anything."

So then her power over the boy had not changed. He wondered how Potter's wife must feel about that before he realized that she could very well _be_ Potter's wife. He hoped she wasn't.

His gaze drifted down to her ring finger. There was no wedding ring, but there was an engagement ring…a small one. Not Potter's then, the boy had inherited his parents' money and the Black fortune, the ring would have been larger. This one was….tiny. Weasley, then. It must be.

"No one else needs to know," She told him, walking to the desk and pulling two folders out of a drawer, "Not unless you want them to."

She handed him one of the folders.

"This is if you want to go."

He looked inside. A foreign passport with an assumed name, an unregistered blackmarket wand, papers to transfer money to an overseas account, a deed to a house half-way across the world, a list of powerful identity charms that had been invented or uncovered since his disappearance.

She handed him another folder.

"And this is if you want to stay."

He opened it. A copy of a law she had been instrumental in passing dealing with regulations concerning time-travel, another with the administrative procedures that dealt with the appearance of a wizard thought to be dead, his wand, the key to his Gringotts account, a postmortem ministry pardon for his crimes,.

"It's your choice."

He wanted to kiss her. A choice. It was the first choice he had been given since he could remember. A free choice that affected none but himself. A choice about how to live in which no lives hung in the balance.

"Thank you," he whispered.

He opened the door to the library and she followed him inside. His eye shifted to the sofa where a white wedding gown sat draped over one arm.

"I was supposed to get married yesterday..." And then...and then the charm she had set up to let her know when he showed up in the shrieking shack activated and she dropped everything else for the moment she had been waiting for for so long. Was she really going to go through with it even before the charm was activated? She fingered the time-turner, "I still could if I wanted to…" It wouldn't have been the first time she had gone back to change events, to change decisions...

If his problem had been too few choices, hers had been too many. She was brilliant, talented, beautiful, famous. She could have been, have done, anything she set her mind to. The choices were overwhelming. Money was the only thing that might have limited her…but then he had left her all of his.

And then there was the time-turner…

The time-turner had only made things worse. With it, she had the ability to make decisions and then go back and unmake them. She could put off a choice and then go back before the deadline and finally decide. And she was drowning, drowning in infinite choices, in infinite time. It was not that she couldn't swim, but she was so far under the water that it seemed to extend equally in every direction. She could swim to safety, if only she could decide in which direction the surface lay.

At least she had had saving him to work for, something to give direction to her life. Now she had nothing.

"Please tell me it's not to Ronald Weasley." She stated in a scalding tone.

He pulled the time-turner from her grasp, breaking the chain which still hung around her neck and silently tucked it into the pocket of his robes.

"You were too good for him at eighteen, I doubt enough could have changed in twelve years to alter that fact."

"You didn't have to," she said with a twinge of desperation in her voice, reaching towards the hidden time-turner in his pocket. He caught her outstretched hand.

"I did. I can see it in your eyes."

"I need it," she whispered, as if fully aware of how pathetic she sounded.

He had used the same tone, hadn't he, when Lily had discovered one of his Dark Arts books and taken it away from him.

"I will let you borrow it when you need it, otherwise it stays with me," he told her firmly.

She walked to the window and ran her hand along its dusty sill. It was as she had something to say, but she said nothing.

The strange feeling he had been getting from her, it suddenly all made sense.

"You're in love with me, aren't you?"

She looked up at him quickly, her mouth dropping open. It was true, then.

He had left her access to everything, it had been the only way. She would have gone through his belongings, read through his journals, spent day after day thinking about him. Had she found something there that she was drawn to?

"What you think you know about me..." he started to say, but she interrupted him. "What? Are you going to tell me that I don't really know you, that going through your things, that reading your writings isn't enough? Who does know you, then? Who have you let get to know you? I'll bet you anything that without you even here, I've gotten to know you better that you've ever let anyone get to know you."

"And?" he asked sardonically.

"And I'm drawn to you, intrigued by and attracted to you in a completely ridiculous but very real way."

He stared at her silently. She turned. She hadn't planned...hadn't planned on ever telling him any of that and was now feeling fully vulnerable and embarrassed. All she wanted to do was get out of there before he made her feel like an idiot.

"I'll just get my things," she said quietly, "I'm sure I can stay with Harry until I find somewhere to live."

"Stay. Stay with me." The words impulsively slipped off his tongue. A demand, even though he knew he had no right to be making demands of her. She had already given him more than he deserved, yet he asked more of her.

She eyed him hesitantly.

"You say that I don't know you, but you know me even less. I'm not the little girl who sat in your classroom."

"I wouldn't be asking you to stay in I thought you were."

"It's been the blink of an eye for you, but I've grown up."

"That's what I'm counting on."

Why was a man who had so jealously guarded his privacy for so many years inviting someone in, inviting another person to share his house with him? Maybe it was that she was already in, that she had already invaded every inch of his privacy. He had let her in a desperate attempt to save his own life. She was right, she probably knew him better than anyone ever had and for once the thought of someone knowing him was comforting.

"Stay," he told her again. He knew better than to ask. She already had too many choices what she needed was an answer.

"Fine," she told him, walking towards the stairs, but turning her head to look at him with a smile he would almost call flirtatious, "but you should know that I've been sleeping in your bed and I don't intend to leave."

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A/N: Sorry, that's it. I have enough long stories that I really should be writing. I just wanted to write this quick little one to get some ideas out.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: This was going to be a 2-chapter story, but then ideas just kept coming to be about a 3rd to wrap it up._

* * *

He lay in bed, listening to the sound of the shower running in the next room.

So much had changed in the blink of an eye. In an instant, he had been transported from the moment of his death in the darkest times the wizarding world had ever known to a relatively peaceful future. Twelve years had passed in a single gasped breath.

The world had gone on without him, as he had always known it would. He had just never expected to catch up with it.

He had never even known that he had wanted to survive the war until the snake had bitten him, until deep within himself he had felt the instinctive urge to survive. He had waited for death for so many years, but it was only by coming so close to it that he had realized it was not what he wanted. In that moment, he had felt an irrepressible urge to live. Maybe it was just that part of himself that always wanted what he couldn't have, but nevertheless he wanted it more strongly than he had ever wanted anything.

In that wildly desperate moment, he had scrawled her name in his own blood because despite all the years he had spent criticizing her in his classroom, in that moment where his life depended on it, he knew that she was the only one with both the ability and the will. It could be no one else.

And he had been right. Against all odds, his crazy plan had worked, _had worked because she had made it work_, he reminded himself. He placed his hand on his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his own heartbeat under his fingers, still filled with wonder at the fact he was alive while another version of himself had been rotting in the ground for twelve years. A strange feeling crept up in him. He guessed it might be hope. Both his masters were dead, had been dead for quite some time now in fact. He was free at last and he felt, for the first time in his life, that anything might be possible.

His attention turned once more to the sound of the shower. Who was this woman he had spent the night with? He had never thought of her in _that _way, not when she had been his student. Why had he been so eager to jump into bed with her now?

He told himself that he had done it out of gratitude, since she had been kind enough to devote her life to his survival, but he knew himself well enough to know that was a lie. He was a Slytherin, he never did anything that wasn't in his own best interest. The truth was that he wanted her.

He had caught only a glimpse of her, of the woman she had become. She was the woman who had lived through too much and who then had taken on even more. He would never have allowed anyone to know him as well as she had gotten to, but he hadn't been here to slam his journals shut and insist that she stop invading his privacy. It was a relief and somewhat of a surprise that someone had gotten close enough to see his very soul and had not been scared away. But although she had read every line of his soul, she still remained a mystery to him.

Not that he had any complaints about the activities that had kept them up half the night....he thought back fondly over the memories. She had insisted it was for her research, to test the effects of long-range time travel on stamina. He had provided her with conclusive evidence that stamina was unaffected. But she was a scientist at heart and was never satisfied by a single trial.

He ached just thinking about her, just thinking about the things he had promised to do to her after she finished her shower...

The sound of footsteps echoed up from the ground floor, shaking him from his thoughts. He instinctively reached for his wand.

Voldemort was dead, but he had not yet asked about what new dangers this time might hold.

"Hermione?" A voice called from downstairs. It was a voice that had changed, had grown deeper and more wearied in the intervening years, but a voice that was nonetheless recognizable.

He pulled on a pair of pants and stepped out into the hallway. _She had given Harry Potter open floo access to his house_…of course. He would have to put a quick end that as soon as the man left.

"Hermione?" came the call again, this time followed by quick footsteps on the stairs.

Severus tucked his wand into his pants and waited.

The man reached the top of the stairs, a look of shock washing over his face.

"Professor," he whispered, as if unsure whether or not the dark wizard he saw was real or merely a hallucination, pulled from his childhood memories.

"You're...you're alive?"

"Mister Potter," Severus replied scathingly, satisfied to see the wizard flinch. Twelve years of his absence had obviously done nothing to erase the memories of the boy's experiences in his classroom.

The younger wizard's wand was out and pointed at him before he could react. _So he actually became an auror then, _a part of his mind remarked_._

"What have you done with Hermione?"

He smirked…_Oh, if he only knew the things I've done with her._

"Seve-rus," a voice called from behind the closed bedroom door. Her voice had a tone, _that_ tone, that unmistakably feminine tone that seeped with sex. By the way Potter's jaw fell open at the sound, he suspected that even the wizard who had barely passed his potions classes knew what the tone meant.

The door flew open and she bounded out, clad only in one of his white dress shirts, unbuttoned.

"I thought I told you to stay in bed," she pouted as she stepped into the hallway, "I wasn't done with you yet. I wanted…" she stopped short as she spotted the hallway's third occupant.

"Harry," she whispered and blushed, biting her lip as her eyes dropped to the floor.

"What are you doing here?"

"I was worried about you."

She waved her hand and the buttons on the shirt discretely slipped themselves through their holes.

"You were supposed to marry Ron yesterday." He sounded unsurprised that she hadn't shown up.

"I know."

"I told him he shouldn't try again."

"Thank you."

His eyes flickered once more to Severus.

"So all your research was successful."

"Yes."

He lowered his wand, looking sheepish for the first time and running his hand nervously through his hair.

"I'm sorry, Professor. I thought for years about what I would say to you when you finally reappeared...I thought of a lot of things I would like to say, but none of them involved sticking my wand in your face and threatening you. I just wasn't sure how you would react when you found out that Hermione had been living in your house. I thought you might be angry. But I guess you reacted better than expected." He glanced disapprovingly once more to Hermione's bare legs and barely-covered bum.

"What will you do now?" He asked her.

"I don't know."

"You can stay with me if you need to. I'll make sure that Ron doesn't come over if you don't want to talk to him."

She seemed hesitant, sneaking a peek at the man out of the corner of her eye.

"You're welcome to stay here for as long as you wish," Severus told her, "days, weeks, months," his eyes said _forever_.

"Yes."

"If you wouldn't mind leaving, Potter, I believe I made some promises to Miss Granger which I intend to keep. These promises involve things you would probably prefer not to be around to witness."

"Yes, sir," he mumbled, making his way towards the staircase.

"And you," he turned to her, slipping his arms inside the shirt and wrapping them around her soft body. "I believe it's time to pick up where we left off."

"Yes, sir," she replied.

The morning faded to afternoon. He drifted off to sleep in the sticky aftermath of sex. She lay next to him and watched him sleep.

It shouldn't have surprised anyone. She was the ultimate bookworm, after all. She had fallen in love with the man through his words. It was his journals, somewhat more than a lab book, although she wouldn't dare say diary in his presence. They were chronicles of his experiments, providing insight into his brilliant mind with notes scribbled into the margins, complaining about his students, complaining about Dumbledore, random observations on the wizarding world.

She had seen it right away, the honesty he poured into these journals. Through years of keeping up his facades for everyone else, he needed somewhere he could bare his soul each night so that it didn't come slipping out at inopportune moments during the day. And she had read every single word.

And now it was his turn, she thought as she slipped quietly out of bed. He didn't stir as she moved the journals to the nightstand next to him so that he could read them when he woke. These were _her_ journals, that she had kept through the years of her research.

After all, it was only fair.


End file.
